Despite growing recognition that disasters are profoundly gendered, relatively little has been written about how research evidence is translated into sustained policy, practice and institutional change. This paper presents a practice-based evidence synthesis of fifteen years of gender, disaster and climate change research undertaken in Australia through the Gender and Disaster Pod (GAD Pod) and, subsequently, Gender and Disaster Australia (GADAus). Originating in the aftermath of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, the paper examines how successive research projects informed policy development, training, national guidance and the establishment of a nationally funded organisation dedicated to gender-responsive disaster risk reduction.
With foundations in feminist scholarship and qualitative research informed by grounded theory, the program progressively expanded from women’s experiences following Black Saturday to include men, people of diverse gender and sexual identities, emergency management organisations and long-term disaster recovery. This retrospective synthesis demonstrates that evidence alone is insufficient to achieve lasting change. It identifies sustained collaboration, knowledge translation, training and persistence in the face of institutional resistance as critical mechanisms for translating research into policy and practice. The paper contributes to scholarship on knowledge translation, gender-responsive disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation, offering a transferable framework for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers.
Authors: Debra Parkinson, Susie Reid, Helen Riseborough & Frank Archer
Source: Progress in Disaster Science
